Pepal is proud to work with transformational leaders in the corporate, government and NGO sectors who are supporting the COVID-19 crisis across the world. Effective leadership and health management are critical to ensure that patients receive the care they need, and the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed this crucial need into focus.
The NJIA programme, a collaboration between Pepal, F. Hoffmann-la Roche AG (Roche), ICAP Tanzania, MoHCDEC Tanzania, and McBride and Lucius, brings leadership development and innovation alive in the context of decreasing the cervical cancer burden in Tanzania, India and Uganda. The Pepal team spoke with leaders from this programme and how their experience as part of NJIA has supported their leadership response to the COVID-19 crisis.
Revocatus Dominic is a District Nursing Officer (DNO) in Tanzania.
District Health Team, Tanzania in June 2020.
“I am very grateful for the NJIA leadership development programme. I have applied many leadership and management skills during the COVID-19 crisis. Some months ago, I was appointed to lead a COVID-19 task force and response team in my district and, to be honest, I was frightened. But remembering my SDI (Strength Deployment Inventory) profile which showed me what kind of a leader I am, as well as the VUCA lessons, changed my perspective on how I react to circumstances. This was the moment I realised leadership is fundamental to crisis management and control. I gathered my team and set goals to save the lives of COVID-19 patients as well as ensuring the safety of the members of my team.”
Markus Ruf has worked for Roche for over 18 years and is the Global Head of Infrastructure Service Integration.
“I attended Cohort 9 of NJIA which took place in Bukoba, Tanzania in November 2019. Since the COVID-19 outbreak began this year, my team has been supporting the transition from roughly 30,000 people working from home to over 100,000 in a very short space of time.
Markus Ruf
When I reflect upon the NJIA programme and how this has influenced my reaction to the COVID-19 crisis, I realise just how much we take for granted. The leadership and management we are used to seeing in high-middle income countries is often driven by experience and the ability to use past events as reference points. At this current time, there are no precedents, and this reminds me strongly of my experience with NJIA.
There is also a need during this crisis to be creative as a leader; there are many correct solutions, yet what is important is choosing the right solution for the context. The same was true during my time in Tanzania. Additionally, the urgent nature of decisions and the fact that the impact that you are creating is quickly visible are both elements from the NJIA programme that have become far more ‘real’ to me since the outbreak of COVID-19.
I think the way in which we work is changing completely, and it further embeds the demand for agile and flexible leadership. There is so much that we can learn from one another and this is enhanced through using the virtual means available to us as a method of sharing solutions to the challenges we are currently facing.”
Pratima Singh is a staff nurse at the Woman’s District Hospital, Jaunpur, India.
Pratima Singh gave some insight on how NJIA has influenced some of her decisions since the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis.
“There is a shortage of PPE at my health facility and it reached the point where I was being asked to go without. However, in using some of the learnings from my NJIA experience, I remained calm and analysed the situation at the health facility. Having done this, I discovered a member of staff had an extra PPE kit which I could therefore use, enabling me to help COVID-19 patients.”
Pratima at work in June 2020.
Batu Berkok is Head of Supply Chain Europe for Roche.
“At the end of January 2020 Roche formed a cross-functional taskforce in response to the COVID outbreak in China, and I was a part of this. The taskforce was initially put together to look at risks for getting medicines to patients especially concerning the supply chain in China, however as the crisis grew the scope of the taskforce and the challenges we were facing also grew: it became about broader supply chain issues and ensuring we could get medicines to patients around the world. The issues became more complex still as Roche began to look across all the different medicines we have, and how they could be used to support patients suffering with COVID-19.
Batu at a focus group session with ASHAs (community health workers) in Varanasi.
In October 2019, I had travelled to Varanasi, India to participate in the first cohort of the ‘NJIA programme’ in India which aims to develop leadership skills at Roche, and among colleagues in the Indian health sector, whilst creating social impact around cervical cancer. My experiences during the NJIA programme supported my approach in my work responding to COVID. During the NJIA programme there were many challenges we hadn’t anticipated and the context was very volatile, things changed all the time, we had to improvise more and try anything and everything. This was similar in the work we were doing at the start of the COVID crisis. Also, at Roche we often want to plan, plan, plan but in my experience during NJIA, and then during the COVID crisis, we thought more about act, act, act, and then adjusting as we learnt.
The other perspective that NJIA bought, which I have considered during COVID, is that although I had travelled a lot in the past, I had never had really been exposed to a government health system in a country like India. NJIA helped me to appreciate and have more perspective on the scale and depth of the challenge that COVID could create for health systems in countries like India. I understood more about what India healthcare professionals would likely go through and we were receiving messages related to this from our Indian colleagues on WhatsApp. COVID is a crisis for everyone around the world, but it is not an equal playing field.
As a leader, NJIA taught me to be more comfortable with not knowing, to be better able to trust my team, to realise how much we depend on each other and how important speed is when lives are at stake – I have brought all this to the response to COVID.”
The NJIA programme is transformational: it intensifies the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world we are increasingly living and leading in. Leaders on this programme are asked to participate and lead in a pressured co-creation environment, and to make a difference for patients in Tanzania, Uganda and India in a short space of time, using the resources that are already available. This experience has supported Revocatus, Markus, Pratima and Batu to lead effectively through the COVID-19 crisis where serving patients in volatile contexts has become a worldwide priority, demonstrating that leadership development is a sustainable force for change.